http://... and are painted on the sides of buses and buildings everywhere. These things are designed to be used by computer programs, right? So ask your friendly local programmer to write a program to use them for something, and she'll go try to dig up the official documentation on what to do, and pretty quickly find that there isn't any for URLs; everything on the subject officially expired years ago. It turns out that all the official documentation is now about "URIs" not "URLs", so that's what you've been using in recent years, whether you know it or not .../robots.txt mechanism for crawler control is kind of a kludge, and works really badly when multiple sites are on the same server, for example members.aol.com. Another symptom is the fact that it's kind of hard to find the RSS feed for a web site. Well, we may be starting to address this issue over in the TAG ...